Dimming of the Day

19 as hypocrisy, (Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was published in 1918), was beginning and perhaps people were less likely to see cricket as providing moral lessons (a hard stance to maintain when your superstar was W.G.Grace) and more to see it as entertainment, both to play and watch. If, however, it had been the best game because it did you good, it was now to be the best game, well, because it was the best game to watch or play. Some at least of the writing before the war was already tingedwith nostalgia, suggesting that the perfection of the wickets (all that Nottingham marl) now meant that mediocre batsmen could survive unreasonably. Ranji’s Jubilee Book of Cricket (1897) but more so Pelham Warner’s Imperial Cricket helped to feed the myth. The website Sportspages calls it, A monumental volume charting the rise and development of the game in every country of the Empire including such far-flung outposts as Bermuda, Egypt, and the Sudan, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Hong Kong. Also chapters on “Cricket and the royal family”, Oxford and Cambridge cricket, I Zingari, Free Foresters. Contributors include F.S.Ashley-Cooper, A.C.M.Croome, Andrew Lang, Cecil Headlam and S.P.Foenander. It came out originally in 1912, the year of the Triangular Tournament which was the first thing to be arranged following the formation of the ICC – itself a profoundly political act. What have cricket’s later historians made of the Edwardian age? Peter Wynne-Thomas 5 heads his chapter The Golden Age? and points out that the upper middle class had hijacked cricket at the highest level. The sport was drifting away from the lower strata of society and the magnet of the soccer field was attracting the workers. Sir John Major, whose book 6 ends with 1914, says as cricket enjoyed its greatest days, the clock was winding down to war. Rowland Bowen 7 calls his chapter The Golden Age of Cricket 1894 – 1914 and says there is one major argument in favour of so considering the twenty years before the First World War that it was, or seemed then, or sometimes seems now, to have been a “Golden Age” in so very many other things. Bowen also remarks – percipiently – that in fifty years all this may look very different. County clubs were not professional organisations. They were and continued to be (most of them to this day) members’ clubs, run for the benefit of members – not for the players or paying spectators - who helped to keep them afloat. They employed professionals originally to play with the members and to bowl to them in the nets, then to bolster the county side, but if there was a member wanting to play, then at most counties he would have priority and a professional would have to make way. For 5 Peter Wynne-Thomas, The History of Cricket , HMSO, 1997 6 John Major, More than a Game , HarperCollins, 2007 7 Rowland Bowen, Cricket: A History , Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970 The Making of the Myth of a Golden Age